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Dear guy

On behalf of all of us sitting in the rows behind you, I’d like to thank you for your antics throughout the 8:15 p.m. showing of Dredd 3D at the AMC Orpheum on Sunday evening. Were it not for your persistent, exaggerated outbursts to demonstrate otherwise, I might have thought that the movie was pretty cool and that you were not cool. Thankfully, though, you came through, and now I know that you, guy, are so much cooler than Dredd 3D.

For example: Without you sitting in front of me, I probably would have enjoyed Paul Leonard-Morgan’s thumping industrial score and maybe even considered it an inspired accompaniment to the futuristic urban hellscape in which the action in Dredd 3D takes place. And I definitely would have thought it pretty neat when, in the trippy computer-graphics driven sequences meant to depict characters’ torpid narcotic experiences, the music slowed to a heavy, spacey brood. But luckily, you were there in front of me, wildly mimicking cliched techno dance moves in both tempos. That was hilarious. Your friends seemed really impressed.

And while some of the dialogue did seem rather predictable, perhaps even simplistic in its bluntness, if you were not sitting in front of me, guy, I might have assumed that had something to do with the fact that the movie was adapted from a comic book, and that the lines that came off as kind of funny were intentionally kind of funny. But your affected, condescending giggles throughout assured me that the directors and screenwriters intended every line in Dredd 3D to be received without any shred of irony and that you, guy, could have written them so much better.

Guy, if you just sat there quietly watching the movie like the rest of us, I might have forgotten that I — like you — shelled out $15 for high-minded fare ripe for mockery if it failed, not some stupid action movie I picked because my wife had to go to bed at 9 p.m. and I wasn’t tired and it was the next thing playing nearby. Certainly we should all have high standards when entering the follow-up to Judge Dredd, a movie that managed to present both Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider at their most irritating.

But guy, your snickering witticisms and your attention-grabbing gesticulations, from the way you took it upon yourself to simulate various 3-D images with your hands as they were happening to the way you reenacted many of the film’s gory slow-motion death scenes immediately after they occurred on screen even though they were plenty engaging on their own the first time, helped remind me that I didn’t just pay $15 to watch Dredd 3D. I paid $15 to watch Dredd 3D and some a-hole in front of me with skinny jeans and a Buddy Holly haircut demonstrating to the world that for whatever reason he was really ashamed to be at Dredd 3D and so needed to remind everyone every few minutes that he was cooler than Dredd 3D, which he undoubtedly was. It was f—ing great, guy. You rule.